3-7 November 2008 - Counterinsurgency Leaders' Workshop (COIN Workshop). Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Sponsored by the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center. This event is a five-day program focused on understanding the fundamentals of insurgency and counterinsurgency. This is a version of the same extremely popular workshop offered to hundreds of military and civilian attendees over the past two years. The COIN Center has expanded the number of slots available to compensate for the high demand of previous sessions. The proceedings are UNCLASSIFED and registration is open to all interested US government and allied personnel.

Odierno Succeeds Petraeus in Iraq - Thom Shanker and Stephen Farrell, New York Times

In an ornate palace built by Saddam Hussein, the United States military command in Iraq changed hands on Tuesday from Gen. David H. Petraeus, who created the strategy known as the surge, to Gen. Ray Odierno, who oversaw its day-to-day operations across a country in which violence has dropped significantly.

Attending the hourlong transfer ceremony were Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates; Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Lt. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, acting commander of the Central Command; and senior Iraqi government and military officials. Mr. Gates later traveled on to Kabul, Afghanistan.

In his first, brief comments as commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, General Odierno said, "We must realize that these gains are fragile and reversible, and our work here is far from done."

Formerly the No. 2 commander, he faces the challenge of improving on the hard-earned security gains in Iraq with fewer troops, as the United States begins preparations to withdraw 8,000 troops by early next year. The overall American military presence in Iraq - 15 combat brigades and support and logistics personnel - would then number about 138,000 people.

General Petraeus will soon take over as commander of the American military's Central Command, responsible for military issues across the strategically important crescent that stretches from Pakistan, across Central Asia and the Middle East, and throughout the Persian Gulf, and includes operations in Iraq and also, most notably, the troubled mission in Afghanistan.

More at the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Voice of America, American Forces Press Service, BBC News and Associated Press.

20 Months in Baghdad - David Ignatius, Washington Post opinion

The night before Gen. David Petraeus turned over command here, a group of senior officers gathered at Camp Victory to say goodbye. It was like a football team's testimonial dinner at the end of a winning season: There were steaks and baked potatoes and a highlight film of the general's 20-month command, scored with rock music, called "Surge of Hope."

The signature line of the video was a statement Petraeus made to Congress when he began what seemed to many people like mission impossible: "Hard is not hopeless." That was his closing comment, too, as he relinquished command in an elaborate ceremony yesterday at the gilded Al Faw Palace. But now, he said, Iraq was "still hard but hopeful."

Petraeus did something astonishing here. It wasn't simply managing the "surge" of U.S. troops, whose precise effects military historians will be debating for years. It was that he restored confidence and purpose for a military that had begun to think, deep down, that this war was unwinnable and unsustainable.

By force of will, Petraeus and his president, George W. Bush, turned that around. They didn't win in Iraq, but they created the possibility of an honorable exit.

More at The Washington Post.

A General for Our Times - The Times editorial

Five years ago a youthful US army general, with a PhD in international relations and a name that seemed plucked from Herodotus, led the 101st Airborne Division into Mosul in northern Iraq. He had taken part in a stunning military victory, but failed conspicuously to celebrate. "This is a race to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people," he said. "And there are other people in this race. In some cases, they want to kill us."

General David Petraeus is still not celebrating. But he is leaving Iraq in a state no sober observer would have forecast when he took command of US forces there early last year. He has pacified large parts of a country that had descended into a solar-heated hell of suicide bombings and sectarian carnage. He has salvaged some pride for the US military after Abu Ghraib, and seen himself hailed as America's most trusted and talented commander of the past four decades.

More at The Times.

Update: Multi-National Force - Iraq Counterinsurgency Guidance signed by General Odierno dated 16 September 2008. Contains Introduction and sections "How We Think", "How We Operate" and "Who We Are".

On the 22nd of June of this year, residents of a Phoenix, Arizona, neighborhood saw an eight-man Police SWAT team apparently serving a warrant. Team members were equipped as usual -- black boots, black Kevlar vests and helmets, Phoenix Police Department shirts and low-light laser aiming devices. But the "SWAT" team was actually a Mexican hit squad carrying out a targeted, and successful, assassination of a troublesome drug dealer -- in the United States. When the real cops arrived, one part of the hit team attempted a tactically-proficient ambush of pursuing police, who counter-ambushed and captured three. The others escaped, most likely back into the drug-fueled insurgency now underway in Mexico, where targeted assassination of officials and intimidation of public institutions -- for example, hospitals treating wounded officers -- is increasingly widespread. The Mexican drug war -- and much else besides -- is spilling over our borders, part of a growing nexus of criminal gang activity and terrorism sponsored by Islamist radicals.

A growing body of evidence shows that criminal gang activities in the United States are taking on the characteristics of a domestic insurgency similar, in some ways, to the war going on in Mexico against drug gangs. There is also growing circumstantial evidence of mutual support between the more serious international gangs and state-sponsored terrorism that will soon pose a clear danger to American national security -- if it hasn't already. This isn't just the local punk "gangstas" that are preoccupying our police, educators and parents across America. Nor is it solely an attack by 9/11-style terrorists, either from outside the U.S. or from sleeper cells inside America. Rather it is a new thing -- a potentially murderous combination that is spreading rapidly northward from South and Central America into densely packed American urban centers into suburbia and rural areas. Unless it is checked, and defeated, the United States will be increasingly vulnerable to civil violence and catastrophic attack from within...

A New Threat: The Crossover of Urban Gang Warfare and Terrorism (Full PDF Article)

Lt. Col. Kent Hayes knows all about the blood, sweat, and excruciating effort needed to lay the initial security piece of the counterinsurgency puzzle. The rangy executive officer for the 24th MEU explains that the Marines' original plan to act as a roaming strike force in Helmand had to be torn up after the first battle with the Taliban. The enemy unexpectedly stayed and fought fiercely for more than a week rather than relinquish Garmsir. An estimated 400 insurgents died. Marine commanders immediately realized that the town was a critical resupply and logistics hub for insurgent operations throughout the province.

"Our original mission was to act as a quick-reaction force for the ISAF commander in Kabul so he could throw us at any escalating crisis in this area," Hayes says. But Gen. David McKiernan, the commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, understood the strategic importance of Garmsir and instead ordered the Marines to stay in the town and implement a classic counterinsurgency operation of "clear, hold, and build." Hayes says that his troops are "not normally in the business of owning ground, but I guess you could say we've rented Garmsir for a while."

After clearing the town of insurgents, the marines held it by establishing routine neighborhood patrols to keep the Taliban at bay. The MEU's civil-affairs unit reached out to the district governor, tribal sheiks, and local imams in Garmsir and the surrounding region, organizing the first shura -- or traditional governance council -- that the area had seen in three years. Local leaders were empowered to pick and prioritize development projects.

With improved security, the Red Crescent humanitarian organization moved in with aid for 1,400 displaced families. The marines, using their own money from the Commander's Emergency Response Program, launched small reconstruction projects: digging wells and repairing irrigation canals; delivering medical services; rebuilding damaged homes; even buying a new speaker system for the local mosque.

The Afghan Civilian Assistance Program, which the United Nations and the US Agency for International Development support, started longer-term projects.

Within weeks, an abandoned bazaar reopened and was swarmed with shoppers. By late summer, nearly eight weeks had passed without the 24th MEU having a single contact with Taliban insurgents, whom the locals were increasingly —to identify for the Marines.

Hayes is unequivocal in naming the key to the 24th MEU's success in Helmand province: "It's a real simple concept -- we learned during this mission that the best way to combat this type of enemy is to mass forces and stay. We actually replaced a small British force that was spread thin trying to cover too much ground with too few troops. Instead, we flooded a town that was strategically important to the enemy with overwhelming forces. That's the way you can win this kind of fight -- with boots on the ground."

Much more at The National Journal.

In the last month, both presidential candidates have stated they wish to send more troops to Afghanistan. Unfortunately, neither candidate has stated what he sees as the United States' strategic interests in Afghanistan. Even more dangerous, neither candidate has expressed a strategic framework for the region. Despite increased violence in Pakistan, Musharraf's recent resignation and the collapse of the coalition government, neither candidate has even commented on how our actions may be feeding Pakistan's instability. Their determination to send more troops seems to be based on the idea that Afghanistan is the "good war" than on any thoughtful evaluation of the situation.

This sudden willingness to increase our support for Afghanistan is particularly peculiar since it has largely been our forgotten war. Despite almost seven years of fighting, the administration has still not clearly articulated a strategy and has starved the effort of resources.

In October of 2001, with 9/11 burned into the nation's consciousness, the Bush Administration committed the United States to rooting Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan. The nation clearly supported that goal and focused intensely on Afghanistan during the fall and early winter of 2001. However, our attention quickly waned as the active fighting seemed to end. Without ever expressing a change in our strategic goals, the effort in Afghanistan slipped from destroying Al Qaeda to establishing a unified Afghan state. The administration asked the United Nations to help establish a government. Yet, even as that government was being established, the Bush Administration shifted its focus to Iraq. Afghanistan became an under funded, forgotten backwater. Given our much larger investment in Iraq, it is natural the nation's attention remained focused on Iraq from 2003 until today. Despite a near collapse of our position in Afghanistan during late 2003, and its subsequent rebuilding by the team of Ambassador Khalizaid and Lieutenant General Barno, Americans paid little or no attention to events in Afghanistan. In fact, after their departure, most Americans didn't notice a slow but steady degradation of the security situation in Afghanistan.

In 2006, in an effort to further reduce U.S. commitments to Afghanistan, the administration convinced NATO to assume responsibility for Afghan security. Yet it still kept significant U.S. forces out of the NATO security organization so they would be free to focus on "hunting terrorists." In short, the U.S. passed responsibility for Afghanistan to NATO without any unified NATO strategic concept or command arrangement.

Now that things are going well in Iraq, it has suddenly come to our attention that things are not going well in Afghanistan. As a result, both candidates are calling for more troops. However, given the fact neither the United States nor NATO has a clearly stated strategy for Afghanistan, the first question the candidates should explore is exactly what that strategy should be. Neither has expressed a clear national strategy for Afghanistan nor how he will convince NATO, the Afghan government and its neighbors to support his strategy and, of particular importance, how his strategy fits into a greater regional strategy. Despite this clear lack of a strategy, both candidates jumped to the assumption that more troops can solve the problems of Afghanistan.

Even worse, to date, the candidates are discussing only Afghanistan without mentioning Pakistan or India. Yet both these Southwest Asian nations are much more critical to the United States future than Afghanistan. Neither candidate has questioned the wisdom of bombing, and likely destabilizing Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation of almost 170 million people, in order to help our security efforts in Afghanistan. Nor has there been a discussion whether dedicating more resources to Afghanistan is more effective than dedicating different but equivalent resources to support Pakistan. This is despite the fact that 80% of the supplies for the forces we have in Afghanistan come by road directly through one of the least stable parts of Pakistan. In short, if Pakistan destabilizes we probably lose in Afghanistan -- the converse is not true.

Yet, our position in Afghanistan appears to be largely shaping our policy toward Pakistan. And our actions in Pakistan inevitably have a major impact on our relationship with India -- a rising nation destined to be the most important of the three.

We entered Afghanistan to destroy Al Qaeda's operating forces and eliminate its training bases. We successfully eliminated the bases and hurt Al Qaeda badly. One reason often given for our presence in Afghanistan is that we must stabilize it as a nation so that Al Qaeda can never use it as a terrorist base again. Unfortunately, Al Qaeda has moved its forces and its bases into Pakistan. The subsequent conflict inside Pakistan is contributing to increasing instability in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and has greatly increased the strain on the Pakistani government.

Before we rush more troops into Afghanistan, we must answer basic questions about our strategy for the region and how our efforts in Afghanistan support that strategy. Good tactics and more troops are not a substitute for a strategy -- and in fact can significantly raise the cost of a bad strategy. Both candidates need to explain the strategy that justifies such a commitment.

T. X. Hammes retired after 30 years in the Marine Corps and now works as a consultant on national security.

As a very minor contributor to a couple of the Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication "White Books" outlining Maneuver Warfare and having once been a professor teaching Maneuver Warfare for American Military University, my attention was caught by William F. Owen's piece, "The Manoeuvre Warfare Fraud," if nothing else than for its catchy title. One might expect it to get a fair amount of visibility due to its controversial thesis. Owen is rightly frustrated with the maneuver warfare concept, especially since he appears to rely on the U.S. Marine Corps publications FMFM-1 and its successor, MCDP-1 Warfighting as the best contemporary articulation. But to characterize the concept as a fraud? A perversion of the truth perpetrated on the U.S. military in order to deceive it? There are indeed difficulties with the maneuver warfare concept, but to label it a fraud seems a bit much. Owen argues that the "the community it was intended to serve" embraced maneuver warfare uncritically. So who is to blame—the advocates who maliciously perpetrated the concept or the U.S. Marine Corps that accepted it so naively and so readily?

Establishing Context and Widening the Lens

From the outset, Owen takes aim at the "maneuver versus attrition" dichotomy that permeates much of the early maneuver warfare writings. This is a fair criticism given that the context which fueled the maneuver warfare and defense reform movements—the experience of the Vietnam War—has long since been lost. It is hard for maneuver warfare to stand alone without that context; the prop of "attrition warfare" grows increasingly thin as collective memory of "body counts" and other purely quantitative indices of battlefield success have faded away. It was ironic at the time that an organization such as the U.S. Marine Corps would embrace the maneuver warfare concept, given its heritage of bloody successes such as Belleau Wood in World War I, Tarawa and Iwo Jima in World War II, Hue City and Khe Sahn in Vietnam. The U.S. Army was also introducing the maneuver warfare concept into its "AirLand Battle" doctrine; embracing it was perhaps more natural, given the Army's focus and history.

Indeed, what is immediately striking about Owen's critique is that it is so narrowly confined to the U.S. Marine Corps and, what is more, to the keystone document that was FMFM-1 and now is MCDP-1 Warfighting. A highly respected U.S. Army author, LTC Robert Leonhard, wrote one of the definitive books on the subject, The Art of Maneuver: Maneuver Warfare Theory and AirLand Battle (1994), characterizing U.S. Marine practice of the concept as being in one of two schools—the German maneuver warfare style (as opposed to the Soviet school counterpart). If Owens is dismissive of the notion that there are separate styles or forms of warfare, one wonders how he would judge Leonhard's careful characterization of the two maneuver warfare schools, which he differentiates in how they practiced command and control. I would also strongly recommend Leonhard's 2000 book, Principles of War for the Information Age, in describing the idea of spectrum ranges and justifying styles of operations.

Owen is certainly correct in pointing out that, compared to the volumes written on maneuver warfare subjects, works explicitly focused on attrition as a concept comprise a fairly small collection. While an AMU Professor conducting a 400-level Maneuver Warfare course, I was interested in developing a companion course entitled Attrition Warfare, but it never came to fruition because of a lack of suitable textbooks.

But I would disagree with Owen that there is not enough of a discussion of attrition warfare or that such a spectrum exists does not stand analysis. MCDP 1-3 Tactics and MCDP 6 Command and Control provide a good deal of additional conceptual detail (and examples). There are also case studies and Tactical Decision Games available in the Marine Corps to illustrate historical approaches and the advantages as well as disadvantages of a more "maneuverist" approach as opposed to an "attritionist" one. Even with 20 years of Maneuver Warfare doctrine behind them, U.S. Marines do not appear to have any discomfort or unfamiliarity with regard to employing attritional methods. What's difficult is knowing which style works best in what kinds of situations. One wishes for the insight and mental agility of General U.S. Grant who showed his mastery of one style of war in the Vicksburg campaign of 1863 and quite another in his drive towards Richmond in 1864. William Owen is right when he argues that these styles are not competing, but complementary.

Perpetuating the Concept

Owen intends his argument to convince the reader that the U.S. Marine Corps accepted the maneuver warfare concept based "largely on ignorance and a lack of intellectual rigor." Unfortunately he does not establish his case, which is based on brief surveys of a number of writers and ideas, Sir Liddell-Hart, Sun Tzu, John Boyd, Bill Lind, and Richard Simpkin. He might have made a better argument through a discussion of how maneuver warfare became U.S. Marine Corps doctrine; a chapter within Terry Pierce's Warfighting and Disruptive Technologies: Disguising Innovation and Fideleon Damian's recent Kansas State University master's thesis entitled, The Road to FMFM 1: The United States Marine Corps and Maneuver Warfare Doctrine, 1979-1989, would have given him some good insights and possible foundation for his argument.

Certainly maneuver warfare has had its share of advocates and advocacy; few with academic credentials are much taken with the "marketing materials." Unfortunately the most vocal critics have not mounted arguments with impressive intellectual force either; a good example by a very prominent Army officer, Daniel P. Bolger (now an army Major General) within Richard D Hooker Jr's Maneuver Warfare: An Anthology, is fairly representative. The most thoughtful critic of "German School" maneuver warfare is BG Shimon Naveh in his book In Pursuit of Military Excellence: The Evolution of Operational Theory as he lambasts WWII German practice of field initiative as being more "personality-driven" tactics for the sake of career advancement or battlefield glory.

Despite this, maneuver warfare—whether Soviet or German school--has a very rich intellectual tradition behind the military "bumper stickers;" it just takes a good bit of research and study to ferret this out. While Owen is quick to point out that John Boyd--one of the "significant advocates" of maneuver warfare--was influenced by Liddell Hart, Lawrence of Arabia, and Sun Tzu, he doesn't explain how Boyd was misled by those "inaccurate translations and interpretations" as he claims he was. A very close reading of Franz Osinga's formidable Science, Strategy, and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd, the best and most comprehensive book we have on Boyd's concepts, do not show any evidence that Boyd fell victim to the problems Owen points out in his critiques of Liddell Hart and Sun Tzu.

Perhaps most telling are Owen's criticisms of William S. Lind, the Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA) process, and the concept of reconnaissance pull. One wonders if the author even understands the latter two subjects of discussion. Boyd's concept of fast transients—refined into the decision cycle (or OODA Loop) idea—was derived from his air-combat maneuvering experience and expanded to encompass command and control in violent conflicts. Designing command and control processes to take less time in any and/or all stages of the OODA process while minimizing degradation to quality in information and decisionmaking confers advantages in combat. The OODA Loop itself is not meant to be unique to maneuver warfare as the author seems to claim. What is different is that maneuver warfare aims to shorten the OODA Loop of the friendly force—and lengthen it for the enemy—as the best way to throw that enemy into chaos and confusion. The chess discussion, as Owen articulates it, does not clarify his complaint to any degree. Regarding reconnaissance pull, what makes it best for decentralized command and control is that units finding gaps tell neighboring and follow on forces where to go instead of waiting for the commander to do it. But Owen doesn't even recognize this. "Recon push" or "command push" is less about telling the recon units where to go and how to do business. It is more about what happens after the recon units find the gaps. Commanders make the decisions on who will exploit those fleeting opportunities—and when. But you'd never know this from reading the author's descriptions.

More Misunderstandings of What Maneuver Warfare Is...and Is Not

Owen seizes on one of Sun Tzu's aphorisms as being a central tenet of the maneuver warfare. Maneuver warfare advocates do not suggest that this style of war will be bloodless, contrary to what the author indicates. A quick check on casualty statistics for some of the cases often used as illustrations by maneuver warfare advocates--the German 1918 Michael Offensive, the France 1940 campaign, Afrika Korps and Israeli mechanized operations in the desert—will put paid to that notion. It's not that maneuver warfare will lead to small casualties. Neither Soviet nor German School advocates can make that claim. What they do insist is that friendly casualties suffered are more than compensated for by disproportionately larger amounts of leverage against the enemy compared to more attritional methods.

Owen's lack of familiarity with maneuver warfare literature is most telling in his observation that "[If] MW was in fact valid, operations could be practiced using detailed orders as opposed to mission command..." This is precisely what the Soviet school maneuver warfare advocates argued, and the best expression of this is found in Naveh's book as well as Leonhard's chapter entitled "The Death of Mission Tactics" in his masterful 1996 treatment, Fighting By Minutes: Time and the Art of War. Leonhard himself was working hard in the late 1990s as part of the Army's Warfighting Evaluation efforts to achieve the kind of "digitized" network that Owen suggests could enable a "fully networked coherent common operating picture" that "could make mission command unnecessary."

Assessing the Criticisms

This points out perhaps the biggest limitation of the maneuver warfare concept and one that Owen unfortunately does not really address. What do we mean by maneuver warfare, really? While the author takes issue with the MCDP 1 definition, he misses the real problem. Certainly there's legitimate concern that focus on "fancy maneuver" in peace shortchanges demands for "weight of shell" in war. But nobody argues vociferously against operating at higher tempos or having better focus against enemy weaknesses instead of strengths. Nobody disagrees that shattering enemy cohesion and will is a good thing when you can do it. Most of the criticisms regarding maneuver warfare have to do with command and control. It's a question of how much centralization and decentralization you need, how to achieve it, how to balance it, and—perhaps most difficult of all—how to transition back and forth between centralization and decentralization when circumstances demand it. There's a fair amount of worry about subordinate leaders exercising "inappropriate initiative." Marine Corps eagerness to get at the Iraqis as fast as they did in the Persian Gulf War unhinged the campaign concept and threatened to chase the defenders out of Kuwait before the U.S. Army's "Hail Mary" left hook could trap and destroy them (see Michael Gordon and LtGen Bernard Trainor, The Generals' War). That may have been partly due to the culture of maneuver warfare that had begun to take root—with too much focus on independent initiative and possibly not so much focus on keeping with the commander's intent and campaign concept.

So perhaps it's not that the maneuver warfare concept is a fraud. It's more that the maneuver warfare concept is fuzzy, even given the extensive literature we have on it. For military minds and lawyer-like analysts and academics who like to have a great deal of precision in terminology, meaning, and application, the maneuver warfare concept falls short, even nearly twenty years after its adoption.

Relevance to Small Wars Journal Readers

The real and lasting contribution of the maneuver warfare clique was to engender more thinking about "the Art of War" in general and not just maneuver warfare in particular. The debate over the maneuver warfare concept—fuzzy as the term was—and whether the USMC should adopt it heightened concern over military judgment and simultaneously raised the level of discussion. Marine General Anthony Zinni argues in his book, Battle Ready, that prior to ascendance of the Marine Corps' prime advocate for maneuver warfare, General Alfred Gray, it was rare to hear officers above the rank of captain talk about tactics. It is hard to believe it was once that way in the Corps, especially now.

It is perhaps worth asking ourselves the question whether our current excellence in counterinsurgency operations was enhanced or inhibited by a maneuver warfare culture in the USMC. Given that maneuver warfare was a reaction to perceived tactical missteps in Vietnam, it is tempting to assess the former and not the latter. But only history (and future historians) will be able to judge.

Petraeus Moves to Even More Complex Challenge - Al Pessin, Voice of America

The top US commander in Iraq will leave his post Tuesday after a momentous year-and-a-half, during which he is widely credited with reversing a spiral of violence that seemed destined to plunge the country into civil war.

In February of last year, when General Petraeus arrived in Iraq, 81 US troops were killed here. The number rose to a high of 126 last May, as more troops poured in, and the general ordered them out into Iraqi villages and neighborhoods to engage a variety of insurgent groups. These days, the US monthly casualty toll here averages about 20. And there has been a parallel reduction in Iraqi deaths, along with an 85 percent drop in overall violence.

"He took a war that was clearly being lost and turned it around," said retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl. "If I were writing a book on General Petraeus' service over the last 18 months, I would call it "Turnaround."

Nagl, who served in Iraq earlier in the war, and is now an analyst at the Center for a New American Security in Washington.

"His own role, his own vision, his own drive, his own understanding of counterinsurgency led him to implement a new strategy," Nagl added. "He understood that the key to success in any counterinsurgency campaign is protecting the population. That comes first."

It was General Petraeus' first two tours of duty in Iraq that led him to believe a new strategy was needed. In 2006, while running the Army's main analytical unit, he ordered the writing of a new counterinsurgency doctrine. In early 2007, with violence in Iraq seemingly spinning out of control, President Bush ordered General Petraeus to take his new doctrine and put it to work.

His success is lauded by analysts across the political spectrum. Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution was an early skeptic of the new strategy and the troop surge that went with it.

"We have to start by saying, it's simply remarkable," said O'Hanlon. "It's the latest, greatest comeback in American military history, perhaps since the Civil War."

At Boston University, Andrew Bacevich also credits General Petraeus with helping to avoid defeat in Iraq. But he is not sure just how much of the credit the general himself deserves.

"I think it's a question about which historians will argue," said Bacevich. "The surge itself, in terms of an additional increment of 30,000 or so US troops, probably was not decisive. More important, probably, was the change in tactics, or doctrine, that Petraeus introduced."

Bacevich says Petraeus was good, but also lucky, with the cease-fire declared by the main Shiite militia, and the change of allegiance among Sunni tribal leaders from al-Qaida insurgents to the new Iraqi government. And, Bacevich says, the success of the overall strategy behind the surge is still in question.

"As I understand the logic of the surge, it was to reduce the level of violence, in order to facilitate a political reconciliation among Iraqis," he said. "The violence has subsided to a degree, a significant degree. But I, myself, don't see that this political reconciliation, and, therefore, the end of US involvement, is going to happen anytime soon."

As General Petraeus flies out of Iraq he knows it will not be long until he comes back. His new job is chief of US Central Command, with responsibility for all US military operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

So, the next question for analysts like Michael O'Hanlon is whether the general can transfer his success from Iraq to Afghanistan, where violence has been increasing.

"If only it were that easy. We're not going to have the capabilities in Afghanistan that we have in Iraq. The Afghan army is much smaller than the Iraqi army and much less well developed," he said. "The US is not going to have the capacity to surge in Afghanistan nearly to the extent that it did in Iraq. And then the sanctuary provided by Pakistan makes the situation much more complicated. Afghanistan is actually in some ways a harder problem at this point."

Still, John Nagl says there are some key lessons from General Petraeus' counterinsurgency doctrine, and his success in Iraq that he should be able to apply to Afghanistan.

"The principles of counterinsurgency that General Petraeus employed so effectively in Iraq, in fact, have much to teach us about a better approach to the war in Afghanistan, which is not going well. Perhaps, the most important of those lessons is the absolute necessity to create security on the ground. And, the only way to do that in a lasting way is to put ground troops in," said Nagl. "So, we need to bring more troops onto the ground; we need a surge for Afghanistan, absolutely, of several brigades. And I expect and I hope to see that in 2009."

President Bush announced what some see as the first installment of the Afghanistan surge last week, but with other units scheduled to depart, it only amounts to about 1,500 troops, and not until February. Officials say gains in Iraq are still fragile, so they cannot shift resources to Afghanistan too quickly. If the situation continues to improve in Iraq, General Petraeus may get at least some of the additional troops he needs for Afghanistan, but not until well into next year. And that will depend on decisions made by the new US president, who has not even been elected yet.

As if the war in Iraq were not a complex enough challenge, General Petraeus will now have to balance continuing needs here with his new responsibilities in Afghanistan, concerns about insurgent and terrorist safe havens in Pakistan and the policies of a new commander-in-chief back in Washington.

Colonel Steven Boylan, who has been the chief spokesman for Army General David Petraeus since 2006, has declined to travel with the four-star general when he moves from Baghdad to Tampa, Fla., in October to take over the helm of the US Central Command. "The family had a vote, and they voted to stay in Kansas," Boylan tells Whispers. He'll return to Fort Leavenworth, where he first hooked up with Petraeus when the general ran the US Army Combined Arms Center and wrote the new doctrine for defeating an insurgency. Boylan traveled with Petraeus to Baghdad, leaving the family in Kansas.

From SWJ -- thanks Steve and wishing you and yours the best in your next assignment as well as fair winds and following seas wherever your travels may take you.

Intel Dump has always offered up first-rate discussion and analysis on foreign policy and national security issues -- even when you disagree with a particular point of view expressed by Phil or a guest blogger you come away smarter for having read the postings.

Phil is on sabbatical (working on the Obama campaign) but he did manage to reel in an all star lineup of guest bloggers to fill the void -- and that's just what they have been doing -- in spades -- great posts on Iraq and Afghanistan (where we are, how we got there and what we need to do), Bacevich's The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, seapower and power projection, supporting our deployed civilians as well as the military and more. Posts that make you think.

What has me wondering out loud this Sunday morning is these 16 posts garnered a total of 157 comments from Intel Dump readership - and not all of those are exactly on-topic. A 17th posting by Bob Bateman concerning Chuck Norris' appearance on Larry King Live has racked up 189 comments (at 1045).

Have we descended that far into partisan politics and celebrity infatuation? Is public discussion on serious and important issues in these times of dynamic political, foreign policy and national security flux impossible? Judging by these comments maybe it is.